As described in the preceding chapter, assessment reform is taking place at
multiple levels--national, state, district, and school--with the goal of meeting
several purposes:

•

Monitoring student progress.

•

Holding schools and teachers accountable for student performance.

•

Certifying student achievement and skills.

•

Aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

•

Influencing instructional practices.

These purposes are not mutually exclusive, and any one performance assessment system may be intended to target several purposes at once.

Data collected during our study reveal that several factors function as
facilitators or as barriers in the assessment reform process and, thus, as facilitators of or barriers to achieving the stated purposes of performance assessment
systems. For example, if a state develops and implements an assessment system
for the purpose of certifying student achievement, then a reliable scoring
procedure is a facilitator for the intended use of the system. However, if there
are technical problems (e.g., low interrater reliability) with the system, then
those problems serve as a barrier to using the system to certify student
achievement; no system that is technically unsound can be justifiably used for
certifying student capabilities.

Our analysis of facilitators and barriers in assessment reform is complicated
by the fact that many performance assessment systems--particularly those
established at the state level--are intended to achieve multiple purposes, and
factors that facilitate the achievement of one purpose may serve as a barrier to

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